


Movie night

by theremin



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Ficlet, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:46:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22733527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theremin/pseuds/theremin
Summary: Greg and Tom watch some James Bond.
Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans
Comments: 11
Kudos: 90





	Movie night

**Author's Note:**

> [x-posted](https://iamtheremin.tumblr.com/post/190825841607/more-gregs-first-impression-of-tom-is-that)

Greg’s first impression of Tom is that he’s handsome. He’s strapping and tall and has striking blue eyes with a schoolboy twinkle. And it’s a nice kind of, approachable handsome, with a slightly tuber-like nose and crooked teeth, not a just-on-a-Doritos-run-on-my-way-to-Mount-Olympus-don’t-talk-to-me-mortal handsome. He’s nice to look at and he can see why Shiv fell for him.

Greg’s second impression of Tom, which comes very quickly after the first one, is that he is a complete weirdo. He later adjusts that in his head to “chaotic neutral”, which sounds kinder and also wiser.

Later than that, in a deserted office, as he shreds damning documents while a patina of terrified sweat forms on his skin and a plan to save his hide forms in his mind, he wonders if he might have been wrong and Tom is actually “chaotic evil”. 

At one much, much later point Greg wonders why exactly Tom has glommed onto him and realizes the obvious truth that Tom is lonely. Tom has friends outside the family but whenever he talks about them it’s in the past tense, and the one time Greg saw any of them - before that Bosch triptych of a bachelor party - Roman got rid of them in minutes. Greg is also family, but at the same time he’s an outsider. Just like Tom. And Tom has seemed even lonelier after he married Shiv. Which Greg finds sad. Surely marriage is the thing that’s supposed to save you from that, from not having someone to lock eyes with who knows what you’re thinking, from not having someone to take to a movie you’re excited to see, from waking up at night in a sweat wondering if anyone will come to your funeral. What’s the point to it otherwise? Besides, you know, money and power.

Tom has seemed kind of extra miserable for a few days and Greg feels bad about it. It’s not the kind of wiry, angry miserable where he flares up like a torch. It’s a defeated, resigned one, he’s uncharacteristically quiet, doesn’t tell any of his shitty jokes. Shiv can’t seem to decide if she’s annoyed with him or sympathetic and Greg senses it’s about something she did. Their arrangement is kind of weird to him. To hear Tom tell it, so far their open marriage has meant Shiv has boned a whole bunch of other dudes and Tom’s single extra-marital encounter resulted in him swallowing his own load. Doesn’t seem fair or particularly hot to Greg. Tom doesn’t see other women or even his friends while Shiv lives it up. Of course he’s sad. Spontaneously, generously, Greg texts him and asks him if he wants to come over for a James Bond marathon. He expects radio silence, an excuse, or more likely, some bizarre non sequiteur involving the phrase “I expect you to”. What rhymes with die? Greg counts fry, dry, cry, sky, my, guy on long fingers and then his phone chimes with the response _On my way fucko!_

Forty minutes later Tom is at his door and they hug, because that is a thing that they do now, when it’s just them. The first time Greg had hugged him, congratulating him on his marriage, he said something like “it’s like being five again and getting a hug from my dad” and Greg felt a little self-conscious, he couldn’t help being freakishly tall and long-armed any more than he could help the color of his hair or the shape of his eyes, but then he’d said, quieter, so only Greg could hear, “it’s really fucking nice actually” and then it became a thing, Tom initiating at first but it just happens now, on its own accord. Greg doesn’t mind. Tom is a tactile dude. He comes bearing gifts, a sixpack of beer and takeaway from California Pizza Kitchen, Greg’s favourite, and he’s excited about it, thanks him, happy both about the food and the gesture. He suddenly wonders if he did shit like this for Shiv when they were dating, got her her favourite things and foods, stored that information for future use.

Greg asks who Tom’s favourite Bond is and Tom says Roger Moore, which Greg is surprised by both because he would have sworn Tom would either be a Connery or a Craig guy, and because Moore is Greg’s favourite too. The Moore movies are funnier, cartoonier, kind of unhinged in their quest to entertain, they’re entertaining even when they don’t try to be, like in A View to a Kill where Moore is like seventy years old and looks terrified throughout his love scene with Grace Jones. 

They go straight for the ne plus ultra of Moore Bonds, The Spy Who Loved Me. Tom grins from the first scene and audibly sighs when the Carly Simon track starts playing.

“This is the sexiest song ever recorded,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Nobody does it better, makes me feel sad for the rest,” Tom sings along in a kind of high, thin croon.

“Nobody does it, half as good as you, baby, baby, darling you’re the best,” Greg joins in for a slightly awkward duet and nods. “yeah, I get it.”

They watch the movie and eat the chicken and polish off the beers, and when it finishes Tom claps.

“Fucking amazing. God damn, they do not make them like that anymore.”

“Wanna watch another one?” Greg asks. He’s in the mood for Live and Let Die.

“Greg, what have I been trying to teach you.” Greg is silent, unsure how to answer that. “Luxury isn’t just a noun, it’s a verb. To luxuriate. Let’s luxuriate in the movie. Let’s discuss it. Let it sink in.”

Greg squints a little. “Uh… okay. I like the bit where the parachute unfolds and it’s like the British flag?”

“Me too!”

“And um… Jaws is cool.”

“ _So_ cool.” A pause. “And uh, the Russian spy, she’s a fox.”

“Totally.”

They’re quiet for a spell. Greg figures he can luxuriate in the movie while he’s getting more beers, so he walks over to his fridge. A thing he loves about having money, actual money, fuck you money, is being able to buy all the drinks he wants. His fridge is stocked with all his favourite sodas, beers, wines, energy drinks, juices, iced coffees. Even bottled Scandinavian glacier water. He doesn’t really drink that but they look sleek and classy.

“Shiv is fucking this architect,” he can hear Tom say, from inside the living room. He swallows.

“Oh. Well uh, that’s like, your thing, right?”

“Our thing?” He draws the word ‘thing’ out, 'thinnnnggggg’.

“Yeah like, you can uh, do what you want and the other person doesn’t get to be mad.”

Tom laughs a hollow laugh. “That’s right.”

Greg uncaps a bottle, gives it to Tom, sits next to him. “But you are? Mad?”

Tom takes a long drag, then nods. “I’m going fucking crazy to be honest with you. He even looks like me. If she wants to fuck a guy who looks like me, why doesn’t she just fuck me?”

“That’s sound logic,” Greg agrees.

“Exactly! You get it!” he drinks some more, stares into space. “I know you think I’m really sophisticated and urbane and everything, but I’m a pretty simple guy really. I just want it to be like, her and me, happy, together. Partners in crime. Have kids. Settle down, properly.”

He sighs again, deep this time, almost like the prelude to tears, and Greg’s heart aches for him. “You deserve to have those things.”

Tom nods, closes his eyes. "Thanks man.” It comes out a little wobbly.

Greg puts his own beer on the coffee table, and wraps gangly arms around Tom.

“Greg.”

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing?”

“Comforting you? Would you like me to stop?”

Another pause. “Well, if it makes you feel better,” he eventually says, hugs back, still holding his bottle, and it’s cold against Greg’s back. Then Tom kind of shifts against him, staying close while putting the bottle down on the floor, it’s awkward but Tom won’t let go of him, and then Tom’s hand slips under his shirt to lie flat against the naked skin of his back.

“Uh, what are you doing?” Greg hears himself say, an echo of Tom’s earlier question, pull and release, pull and release.

“Feeling you up,” Tom mumbles. 

Greg is unsure how to feel. Tom has had a weird so-alpha-I’ll-literally-suck-your-dick banter going with him from the literally first time they met, but he’s 99% sure it’s just the jargon of whatever frathouse he was in decades (decades, Greg, plural) ago and not due to any knowledge of Greg’s actual sexual history or genuine suspicion of the attraction he feels for Tom, which is at best complicated and regrettable and at worst something he really should look into a professional exorcism to get rid of. 

“Why?”

“Would you like me to stop?” Another echo. Pull and release. 

“I don’t know.”

In truth, Greg does not mind Tom’s big hand on his back, would not mind kissing him here on his sofa, wouldn’t mind kneeling in front of him, wouldn’t mind doing any of the things that are technically allowed within his marriage so it would be cool, right, but no way is he going to be the one that says the thing that can’t be taken back. He may want Tom, but he doesn’t trust him.

Tom’s hand slides down his back and all the way to his side and Greg gasps involuntarily, and Tom grins an inane grin. “Let’s watch Live and Let Die.”


End file.
